Lately I've been changing things up a bit. For several months I used a little Lenovo ThinkPad X220 running Windows 7 and had a great experience -- it felt rock solid and responsive, with fantastic battery life. Then I switched to a MacBook Pro, and now that I've gotten used to it, I actually find it more or less a wash between the two (sorry, Apple fanboys).

If I had to sum up in one word the most exciting thing that happened to cloud computing in 2011, I'd have to say it's <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/t/private-cloud/openstack-wants-be-your-data-center-os-167932">OpenStack</a>. This open source project, launched by <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/no-2-cloud-provider-rackspace-tries-harder-625">Rackspace</a> and NASA in late 2010, is assembling a <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/what-the-private-cloud-really-means-463">private cloud</a> "operating system" for the data center that promises vast increases in operational efficiency. The momentum behind it is phenomenal; at last count, 144 companies back the project, including Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, and Intel.

Desktop virtualisation harks back to the good old mainframe days of centralised computing while upholding the fine desktop tradition of user empowerment. Each user retains his or her own instance of desktop operating system and applications, but that stack runs in a virtual machine on a server -- which users can access through a low-cost thin client similar to an old-fashioned terminal.

At the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Microsoft made its biggest foray yet into cloud computing with pricing and partnership arrangements for Microsoft Online Services, a family that includes Online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications, Office Live Meeting, and Dynamics CRM.

Project Big Green is IBM's sprawling initiative to increase the energy efficiency of IT. In May 2007, Big Blue announced that it would redirect no less than US$1 billion per year to Big Green, which applies both to solutions IBM offers to customers and to the company's own internal IT operations.

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